Item 100. Minutes from the April 22, 1998 Board of Directors meeting Scott Helmke (scott) Sun, Apr 26, 1998 (14:58). 154 lines, 6 responses. Attendees: arthurp, kaplan, dang (board), other, scg (board), janc (president), valerie (board), mta (board), scott (secretary), aruba (treasurer), and roadtrip. 0.00000077: The meeting was gavelled to order by janc at 7:49pm. 0.00000063: Treasurer's Report Report for March: Took in $740.40, spent $584.05, for a gross income of $156.35. 3 new members; rtgreen, jdeigert, and a person who wishes to remain anonymous. The Grex Store is currently at -$216.60 in cash, $384.10 in inventory. Report for April: So far have taken in $388.40, of which $190 is for spare parts fund drive. Two new members, son1 and sisiro. April has not been a good month so far. 0.00000060: Fund Drive: Spare parts fund drive is currently about $220 short in pledges, more than that short in money actually received. We have not yet raised enough money to reach the goal, and the pledges seem to have stalled. Valerie reported that she had just added announcements about the fund drive in party and other places. Some general discussion about raising money and/or reducing costs: 1. Have a table at UM "FestiFall" to publicize Grex to UM students? 2. Remove IC-Net internet link (our old internet link, currently only a backup for us). This would save about $36/month in phone lines. 3. Remove one or more dialin lines. This would save about $18/month/line. Current statistics suggest that we have lines that are only used for about 15 minutes a day or less. Needs to be discussed in Coop before any decisions made. 4. Have newuser program send a mail message to each new account about Grex funding. This avoids adding more text to the amount already displayed by newuser while creating an account. Valerie would like to do this; no apparent objections from others at meeting. 5. Send a mail message to each account after it has been active for 3 months? Valerie and Janc are willing to work on the software to do this. 6. T-shirt sales need more publicity. 7. Auction; next one to happen starting in June. Some ideas like bigger-ticket items, Web page with photos of more items. Bret Weintraub (formerly zook) has donated a lot of games for Macintosh and other cool things. (aruba reads a list of ideas condensed from recent Coop discussion) 8. other: reduced rates for short period, perhaps $4/month 9. jared: Student discount 10. keesan: raise membership rates 11. rcurl: publicity & appeals to current users 12. cmcgee, other: students (secretary is not sure what is being referred to here) 13. rcurl: already have discounted $0 rate 14. aruba, rcurl: send mail to 6 month old accounts asking for money 15. mta: T-shirt giveaway (already being done; Misti is raffling off a T-shirt to all new 1 year memberships). 16. janc: more fundraisers? more T-shirt sales? more members? 17. rcurl, mta: email client wrapper plugging membership 18. aruba: bigger auctions 19. dpc: email to non-members 20. valerie: have newuser send mail to people (see above) 21. other: wrapper on email clients that goes away when they become members The current spare parts fund drive will be continued for a while longer. The current membership chair, omni, has not been doing much, and is currently too busy to to anything. Find another person to take over this job? 0.00000054: Publicity Committee: The CTN (local cable TV) ad is currently running. The 670 upgrade press release is currently posted in Coop, with revisions being suggested. Place an ad in the People's Food Coop newsletter? Some money has been unofficially budgeted for advertising, but not approved by Board yet. The Arborweb WWW site (part of the Ann Arbor Observer) will have a banner ad from Grex in August of this year. Valerie has volunteered to design a business card sized flyer for Grex (what it is, how to connect). Mta and Scott have each pledged $5 for printing costs. 0.00000049: Technical Committee: 1. ISDN line had problems for about a week, eventually fixed by Ameritech. Internet connection was somewhat reduced during this period. 2. Valerie has written a new connection statistics program called "qgraph". 3. There is now a weekly automated check for reaped conference fairwitnesses. 4. Reaped user's Web page listings are now automatically deleted. 5. HVCN was temporarily down recently, preventing Backtalk from displaying the graphic button images hosted by HVCN's server. 6. User account for auction archives accidentally deleted recently; need to restore from tape backup. 7. Ryan (ryan1) has not been an active partyadm for several months now; should he be removed from partyadm list? 8. New partyadms are trained and ready to start. 9. More staff notes added to Grex Web site, including hardware and software listings for current system. 10. Our new 670 system had its first crash recently, after 2 weeks of uptime. We will probably start rebooting on a regular basis to prevent this. 11. The number of ptys (telnet connections) has been increased to 64, with no loss of system speed. 12. Mdw did a number of sendmail updates. One effect of this is that .forward files must now be world-readable for forwarding to work. 13. Arthurp has a PC for a mail processing machine nearly finished, needing only a hard disk (later in the meeting, roadtrip offered to donate a 340Mb IDE disk to Grex). 0.00000044: New Business: Scott wants to buy an old monochrome monitor from Grex for $10. This was subject of some discussion about non-profit rules. In general, it's OK if anyone can make an offer to buy something from Grex, not just board members and staffers. To do future sales, somebody will need to post a list of available items so that regular Grex users can make offers on items. Scg moved that "Cyberspace Communications, Inc, sell a monochrome monitor to Scott Helmke for the price of $10.". Seconded by janc. Voting went 5 in favor (dang, janc, mta, valerie, scg), 1 against (aruba), and 1 abstaining (scott). Future sales will be discussed online and at next Board meeting. Janc has nearly completed the 501(c)3 application. During this part of the meeting, the application was passed around to fill in Board member's names and addresses. Janc will post an online version before submitting the application to the goverment. Arthurp brought in a "Genuine Sun Microsystems 63450-001 Grex Hood Ornament", a gauge (with the needed stuck in the red zone) nicely mounted on a wooden base. This can be placed on Grex in the Pumpkin. Roadtrip offered to donate a used 340Mb IDE hard disk drive to Grex. Aruba is currently trying to contact the Pumpkin building management to settle on what our electricity payments should be. Scott and Valerie gave some information on how to contact the landlady. 0.00000041: The meeting is closed by janc at 9:34 pm. Submitted April 26, 1998 by Scott Helmke, Secretary of the Board of Directors. 6 responses total. ---------- (100) #1 Mary Remmers (mary) Sun, Apr 26, 1998 (18:20). 1 line. Nice minutes. Thanks, Scott. ---------- (100) #2 Rane Curl (rcurl) Sun, Apr 26, 1998 (18:24). 1 line. Sunsets are usually red..... ---------- (100) #3 Mark A. Conger (aruba) Sun, Apr 26, 1998 (19:00). 23 lines. Thanks Scott. A few additions: -I was handed about $300 during the course of the meeting, so April will indeed finish in the black. -I think it's fair to say that the consensus of those present for the fundraising discussion was that the first thing we ought to try is a mail message to everyone who isn't a member, sent when they pass their 3-month, 6-month, 9-month, etc. anniversaries on Grex. This requires putting data from newuser into an SQL database and then writing a program to read the data and send the mail. Valerie volunteered to do the first part and Jan the second. We also should discuss, here in coop, what the text of the mail message should be. -The reason I voted against selling a monitor to scott is I wanted there to be a standard procedure in place before we did it. My vote certainly had nothing to do with Scott personally. The rest of the board felt that this particular monitor had already been discussed in public enough (without anyone saying that Scott wasn't offering a fair price) to warrant going ahead with the sale. That's OK with me, I guess, but I hope that we get a procedure in place before the next time this comes up. I think someone ought to be appointed "Minister of Junk", and then be responsible for posting and maintaining an item in coop (possibly linked to classifieds) which lists all the excess junk which Grex owns and would like to get rid of. The Minister would also set a price for each item. Anyone could buy something just by responding in the item and sending in a check. ---------- (100) #4 C. Keesan (keesan) Tue, Apr 28, 1998 (14:34). 3 lines. Jim is willing to help with pricing junk, same prices as Kiwanis. (This Sat he plans to have a half-price sale on monochrome monitors - the usual price is $5-15, and yard sales are much cheaper). ---------- (100) #5 Rane Curl (rcurl) Tue, Apr 28, 1998 (14:40). 2 lines. What's the *smallest* mono available with composite video input? Any that work on 12 VDC? ---------- (100) #6 Richard T. Green (rtgreen) Wed, Apr 29, 1998 (04:39). 2 lines. I have a 9" mono composite monitor, with both 110VAC and 12VDC power supplies. Make me an offer...